Exploring Public Housing and Just Action: A Reading List
In collaboration with the National Public Housing Museum, we are honored to celebrate the June 1 event with Richard & Leah Rothstein for Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law. Just Action provides a roadmap for achieving social justice by challenging the scourge of residential segregation.
As part of this partnership, we have curated a comprehensive reading list that delves into the history and narratives surrounding residential segregation, public housing, and mass incarceration. This collection, featuring history, sociology, urban studies, fiction, and poetry, brings together our most incisive and imaginative scholars and authors on these critical issues. Join us on June 1 as we explore the rich tapestry of stories and insights that shed light on this vital aspect of our society.
Related Titles
In the gripping first-person accounts of High Rise Stories, former residents of Chicago's iconic public housing projects describe life in the now-demolished high rises. These stories of community, displacement, and poverty in the wake of gentrification give voice to those who have long been...
Joining the ranks of Evicted, The Warmth of Other Sons, and classic works of literary non-fiction by Alex Kotlowitz and J. Anthony Lukas, High-Risers braids personal narratives, city politics, and national history to tell the timely and epic story of Chicago's Cabrini-...
In the popular imagination, public housing tenants are considered, at best, victims of intractable poverty and, at worst, criminals. More Than Shelter makes clear that such limited perspectives do not capture the rich reality of tenants' active engagement in shaping public housing...
Blueprint for Disaster traces public housing's history in Chicago from its New Deal roots through current mayor Richard M. Daley's Plan for Transformation. In the process, D. Bradford Hunt chronicles the Chicago Housing Authority's own transformation from the city's most progressive...
"Alex...
In Reclaiming Public Housing, Lawrence Vale explores the rise, fall, and redevelopment of three public housing projects in Boston. Vale looks at these projects from the perspectives of their low-income residents and assesses the contributions of the design professionals who helped to...
From the almshouses of seventeenth-century Puritans to the massive housing projects of the mid-twentieth century, the struggle over housing assistance in the United States has exposed a deep-seated ambivalence about the place of the urban poor. Lawrence J. Vale's groundbreaking book is both a...
In the early 1980s the tenant leaders of the New Orleans St. Thomas public housing development and their activist allies were militant, uncompromising defenders of the city's public housing communities. Yet ten years later these same leaders became actively involved in a planning effort to...
High-rise public housing developments were signature features of the post-World War II city. A hopeful experiment in providing temporary, inexpensive housing for all Americans, the "projects" soon became synonymous with the black urban poor, with isolation and overcrowding, with drugs, gang...
Recipient of 2007 The Hyde Park Historical Society Paul Cornell Award A collection of interviews with African Americans who came to Chicago from the South. In their first great migration to Chicago that began during World...
**One of Buzzfeed's 18 Best Nonfiction Books Of 2016**
A lyrical, intelligent, authentic, and necessary look at the intersection of race and class in Chicago, a Great American City In this intelligent and highly important narrative, Chicago-native Natalie Moore shines a...
Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award
Winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize
Winner of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize
--Davarian L....
